


Jean Berenson, Metal Detector

by TomBerensonsGhost



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:40:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26188120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomBerensonsGhost/pseuds/TomBerensonsGhost
Summary: Jean Berenson becomes an amateur metal detector, and uncovers some things that she shouldn't.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	1. Origin Story

* * *

Jean Berenson huffed and rolled over in bed. The clock glared 2:55am in its sinister red LED face. Beside her, Steve snored quietly and peacefully. Like a jerk. Jean rubbed her hands hard across her eyes, little white and blue bursts of light blurring out the darkness. It was no good. She wasn’t going to sleep tonight.

She considered the things she could do instead; work on her next script; watch some trashy late-night TV; read a few chapters of her book. Her mind was too tired for any of those things, but her body was buzzing with energy, wouldn’t let her fall asleep. She sighed and slid noiselessly out of bed.

She paced around downstairs for a while, kitchen to dining room to living room and back again. Everything was clean and in its place. She’d even picked up after the kids earlier in the evening, before she ever tried to go to bed, so there weren’t even any loose shoes or backpacks lying around to tuck into some closet.

Jean wandered into the garage. Now here was a project to tackle. Piles of summer equipment, ready to be cleaned, sorted, and neatly stored in boxes until next year. She began by making a pile of tennis rackets. She sorted various sports balls into a cardboard box. Whose rollerblades were these even? They were too small for anyone anymore, so she started a donations pile. She separated a tangle of masks and snorkels and set them aside to wash the dried salt off of them in the morning.

She pulled a large box down from the top of a precarious pile.

“Steve…” she said, shaking her head.

Every now and again, Steve caught wind of a new hobby that he then _had_ to take up. Last year it had been fishing, the year before, skateboarding (yikes), and this past year, it had been metal detecting. He had read an article in some magazine that someone had left at his office about someone who had uncovered ten thousand silver dollars in their own backyard, and decided that he should take up metal detecting too. So he had picked out a top of the line metal detector, one that could be used under water, one that came with something called a ‘pin-pointer’, one that could differentiate between eight different types of metal still underground. Then he used it exactly two times in their own backyard, digging up old bottle caps and soda tabs, and one quarter (‘From 1968!’ he had said, as though Jean didn’t have coins older than that in her purse).

Then he had carefully packed it back up, for safekeeping, and put it out in the garage, and had promptly forgotten about it.

Jean stood over the donations pile, cardboard box in hand, reading the advertising on the side of the box. It really did seem quite a good machine, if you were interested in that sort of thing. She sat down on the floor and opened the box. Everything was like new, even the cord that charged the internal battery was still wound up in its little black twisty-tie.

The sun was just beginning to peek through the garage windows, shining into Jean’s eyes and reminding her that the family would be getting up soon. She began pushing all her boxes up against the wall. She would finish this tomorrow. _Tonight_ , she corrected herself.

Almost as an afterthought, she unwound the twisty-tie, plugged one end of the cord into the wall, and the other into the metal detector. It made a pleasant beep-beep as it began to power up.


	2. Dogs are Always Getting You into Trouble

* * *

Jean got through the day fair enough. She managed a little midday nap between turning in her script and the time the boys got home from school. Not that they were home for long. Tom was always running off to plan another get together of the Sharing, and Jake was always running off to do… something ill-advised with Marco, she assumed. But everyone was back in time for dinner, which was nice because Jean always enjoyed the feel of a family dinner.

She loved sitting down to hear everyone chat about their days, even though she knew everyone was keeping their little secrets.

Steve would leave out the extra doughnut he had once he got to work (but usually absentmindedly stuffed the sticky napkin in his pocket for her to find later), Tom would gloss over what they actually accomplished at these Sharing meetings he went to all the time (probably more goofing off than community service, in reality), and Jake was always vague about what he did while he was gone all day (though Jean happened to know from Cassie’s mother that they were often both mysteriously missing around the same times). Jean loved to puzzle out exactly what each member of her family was doing during their free time, and tuck these little secrets into the back of her mind, a little clandestine portrait of the Berenson family as they really were.

That night, after the dishes were washed, and the living room straightened, and everyone was moving quietly to their bedrooms, Jean dutifully yawned, feeling so deliciously tired that she was sure she would be able to fall asleep the moment she climbed into bed.

Sadly, she was wrong.

Again, she lay awake, listening to the sounds of the house. The creaking of the floorboard as someone went into the hall bathroom. The occasional car driving down the street. The _tick-tack_ of Homer’s nails on the kitchen tile downstairs. The _tick-tack_ ing again.

This _tick-tack_ ing was going on for too long.

Jean sighed and pulled herself out of bed. She crept downstairs to let Homer out into the backyard.

As he heard her approaching, Homer sat beside the back door, tail sweeping happily across the floor.

Jean unlocked and opened the back door, and Homer smiled stupidly up at her, tongue lolling out to one side.

Jean snapped her fingers and motioned for Homer to go outside.

Homer stood up and did a little doggy dance, but did not go outside.

“Go. To. The. Bathroom.” Jean said, jerking her thumb out the door.

Homer spun in place.

“Look, buddy, I’ve slept forty minutes in the past three days, if you want something from me, you’re going to have to get a lot more coherent, real fast.”

Homer trotted to the front door and sat down. He lifted one paw, to indicate that he was ready to put his harness on.

“Hnnng. No, it’s too late.” Jean walked toward the entryway. “You can go in the back yard, or you can hold it until morning. I’m not taking you on a walk.”

Homer did another happy dance at the word ‘walk’. Jean did what the kids of today would call a ‘facepalm’.

“Fiiiiiiiiine,” she said, reaching into the garage to grab Homer’s harness and leash. As she fumbled for the leash, she noticed a tiny green blinking light in the garage.

_Oh, the metal detector,_ she thought. _It’s the middle of the night, a perfect time to look for some buried treasure._

She grabbed the metal detector, tucked a garden trowel in the waistband of her pajamas, and leashed up the dog. They slipped quietly out the front door and into the street.

As they walked along, Homer stopped to smell every bush and stick and leaf they came across, and Jean fiddled with the settings on the machine. She pushed the power button, and the display sprang to life with a soft glow. It lit up all the different options at once, like a car starting up. The icons were nearly as numerous, and as incomprehensible.

The icons blinked once, and the display went blank again, but remained lit with a soft orange glow.

Jean waved the sensor around in the grass, but nothing happened. Curious, she pulled out the trowel and held it close to the business end of the contraption. The detector made what Jean considered to be an unnecessarily loud beep, and a little icon of a dumbbell popped up on the screen, accompanied by the number one.

“Rude of you to call _me_ a dumbbell,” Jean muttered under her breath. She considered the symbolism of the dumbbell, and Homer considered the tastiness of something he had just found partially concealed in the neighbor’s azalea bush. Jean realized that the trowel must be made partially of iron, and Homer realized that whatever lump of rotting food he had found was positively delicious. They both were quite pleased with themselves.

Jean decided to try something else. She waved the wand over Homer’s collar, this time prepared for the overbearing beep. She was surprised to find that the tone of the beep was different, though the volume seemed to be the same. This time the icon it displayed appeared to be a stretched out letter ‘I’. After some brow furrowing and careful consideration, Jean came to two conclusions. First, that the elongated ‘I’ was meant to represent an iron beam, and second, that whoever had designed this piece of equipment was better suited to designing cryptographic codes.

The pair shuffled onward into the night, Jean allowing Homer to lead the way. Eventually, they came to the beach. As it was nearing two o’clock in the morning, the beach was scarcely populated. A few crabs scuttled here and there, and Homer tugged at his leash to chase them. Jean unclasped the leash and Homer darted off into the water. He emerged a few seconds later, shaking the water out of his fur and bounding down along the shoreline, nipping at the occasional crab as he rushed by.

The lights from the street and the full moon reflecting off the water illuminated the beach well enough that Jean could see Homer darting back and forth in the distance. She swung the metal detector in wide arcs around her, not really expecting to find anything.

She had seen people metal detecting on the beach before; old men in enormous hats, eyes cast down at the sand, stopping every now and then to dig up a soda tab or a beer can, or one time a set of very rusty car keys. She didn’t much feel like getting down into the damp sand to dig up garbage, so she passed over each spot as the machine beeped its various warnings and displayed its crude icons. A little tin can here, a small pile of coins there, each accompanied by a number which Jean took to indicate its supposed depth.

She decided to call it a night. Looking around for the dog, she realized how far they had wandered down the shore. Not wanting to disturb the stillness of the beach with words, she snapped her fingers and jingled Homer’s leash in an attempt to get his attention. She didn’t see him, but she could hear some animal rustling in the reeds of the dunes to her left. She jingled the leash again, and was greeted with a cheerful ‘ru-uff!’ of Homer inviting her to play.

Jean stood at the base of the dune, shaking the leash and snapping her fingers. Homer ran back and forth, just out of sight.

“Hey! I can’t walk on the dunes! That’s illegal! Come out here right now before I call the police on you!” Jean hissed at her dog, shaking a reprimanding finger. Homer, however, had no respect for the laws of mortal men, and continued to romp in the tall reeds like a dog without a care in the world (which is to say, like almost any other dog presented with a beach).

“You come out here!” Jean whispered in mock threat, waving the metal detector at the dog. As the metal detector came in contact with the sand of the dune, it made an earsplitting noise of every tone at once, louder than it had been all night. Jean dropped the machine, and the display lit up with each of the tiny icons in turn, dumbbells and iron bars and tin cans and what appeared to be an oddly shaped coffee pot (and in the adrenaline haze of being blasted off the beach with noise, Jean remember that coffee pots used to be made of copper, and therefore that icon must indicate that a copper object is nearby. _Very clever_ , she thought.).

The detector continued its banshee song of metal for about five more seconds, and then crashed into silence with a small _pop!_

Jean picked herself up and dusted the sand off of her pants as Homer approached cautiously from the other direction. They both stood looking down at the now quiet object, when Jean finally had the good sense to pick it up and move it away from the area that had caused such a commotion. That was unfortunately the last of her good sense for the night, because while she could have said to herself ‘You know what that looks like? Not my problem,’ and returned to her comfortable home and her peaceful family and lived for a few more years in blissful ignorance, she unfortunately did not do that.

Instead, she decided to break the law and dig in the sand dune, and that was the least bad thing that would happen to her for a long time.


	3. Wanna Know How I Got These Scars?

* * *

Homer, now properly chastised by the earsplitting noise of the machine, decided that perhaps it would be best to be nearer to a protective human, and cowered behind Jean.

“‘Let’s get a dog,’ they said. ‘It will protect the house,’ they said,” Jean muttered to herself as she pushed her little shovel into the soft sand of the dune. It wasn’t long before she hit upon something solid.

She set her trowel down beside her (and Homer sniffed it heavily, to make sure it wasn’t likely to attack), and began brushing sand away with her hands. Before long, she had uncovered a small but heavy object. The area next to the dunes was covered in shadows, so Jean wandered closer to the reflective surface of the water to get a better look at what she had found.

It was definitely metal, it felt cool to the touch under the gritty sand that clung to it. It seemed vaguely gun-shaped, and Jean thought at first that it must be some kind of children’s toy, like a water pistol or a very fancy pop-gun. But the handle and the trigger seemed far too large to be meant for children.

Jean tried to brush off the remaining sand, looking for any kind of logo or brand name, but found none. It was quite dark, she probably just couldn’t see it. It had a dial on the side, however, and Jean could make out some markings arranged in a semicircle around the dial, but in the dim light she couldn’t make out what they were. Numbers or letters of some kind, presumably.

Homer was still skulking nervously behind her, pressing heavily against her legs.

“Watch out, Homer, or I’m going to shoot you,” Jean said, turning the gun toward the dog.

Homer let out a little whine, and cowered harder than even, golden fur practically fusing with the sand.

“Oh, don’t be a baby, I’m just kidding,” Jean said, tousling Homer’s ears. “I’m going to shoot that crab.”

Jean whipped the gun around and pointed it down into the sand a few yards away, where an unsuspecting crab was enjoying the incoming waves and the delicious seafood buffet that it was providing.

Jean moved her finger to the trigger and prepared herself to say ‘pew, pew’ but did not get the chance. As she gently pulled the trigger back, the air around her buzzed momentarily with electricity, and then she and Homer were peppered with millions of razor-thin shards of glass.

Jean dropped the gun and instinctively spun around to shield Homer from the spray, her face and arms already covered in a thousand tiny nicks. Homer broke free and ran down the beach. Jean stayed crouched in the sand until she finally felt the shower stop. Slowly, she turned around and saw that where there had once been a little white crab enjoying an evening meal, there was now a large crater on the shore.

She stood up and took a tentative step toward the spot. The surf came in and filled the hole, the sand around it sizzling and giving off steam. As the tide moved out again, Jean crouched down to peer inside, and found that the entire hole was lined with a thick layer of glass.

_Lightning must have struck exactly where I was pointing_ , Jean reasoned with herself, slowly reaching out to touch the newly made glass bowl. Of course, the fact that it was a perfectly clear night did nothing to dissuade Jean from her completely plausible explanation that a bolt of lightning happened to appear at the exact time and location that she had pulled the trigger on that gun, which is definitely an oversized child’s toy. Absolutely a perfectly infallible conclusion. No need to think about that any further.

The glass inside the hole was still too hot to touch, but was rapidly cooling with each incoming wave. Jean glanced over at the gun, laying on the sand where she had dropped it. The tide was washing over it as well, inch by inch moving it out into the ocean.

Jean could have let it go. She could have said ‘Goodbye, gun! I don’t need you in my life! You can be Poseidon’s problem now!’ and trotted off to search for her dog. But as we have said, Jean does not make the best choices. She is a Berenson at heart.

Instead, she dug the still-cooling crater of glass out of the sand, tipped the water out of it, and gingerly placed the gun inside. She then returned to the sand dune to retrieve her trowel, metal detector, and leash, and hoisting them all upon her hip, began to walk home.

When she arrived, Homer was waiting for her on the front porch, as she knew he would be. He was hiding underneath the porch swing, but betrayed himself with the thumping of his tail when he saw Jean approaching.

Jean shifted the weight of her load to the other hip, opened the front door, and waited for Homer to dash inside. Too many people had been tripped because they made the fatal error of believing that they could enter the house before Homer, and Jean didn’t want to take a chance of tripping with her very dangerous load. Homer made a beeline for his bed, and promptly lay down as though he never had any intention of going outside ever again.

Once inside, Jean realized that she hadn’t really considered what she was going to do with these items, now that she had them.

She set down the hunk of glass on the kitchen table and flipped on the light.

Now that she could see it properly, it was actually quite pretty. The glass shimmered with tiny rainbows, sending little prisms off onto the walls. It was almost like a work of art. Inside the glass were trapped numerous seashells, some of them almost seemed to be melting into the glass itself ( _how hot did something have to be,_ Jean wondered, _to_ melt _a seashell?_ ).

Jean turned next to the gun she had found. She was reluctant to touch it, because they had just had their kitchen redone last spring, and it would be such a pity if she had to go about picking out new cabinets and countertops all over again.

Also she might kill everyone. She wasn’t quite sure.

She tried to examine it from where she had already set it down, without touching it. She couldn’t see any hole in the barrel, like you would expect from a regular gun, but of course you wouldn’t expect a regular gun to turn a perfectly innocent crab into a valley of molten glass, either, so perhaps it wasn’t the best comparison.

Thinking of what she had done to that virtuous and upstanding sea creature was making Jean sad, so she decided that it probably was a bad crab to begin with. Probably committed war crimes against other crabs. It was the mustache-twirling villain of the beach, and it deserved to be blown to smithereens. Yes, ascribing personality defects to a now deceased crustacean was exactly what Jean needed to take her mind of the unfathomable information before her. It was becoming undeniable that she had accidentally uncovered an incredibly powerful weapon, and she did not know what to do with it.

She could turn it into the police, but that somehow didn’t seem like it would solve any problems.

She could turn it into the government, but let’s be honest, they probably already knew about it, right? If the government was out there losing valuable and dangerous technology on a public beach where just last weekend her own son had hosted a community barbecue, they didn’t really deserve to have it back.

She could at the very least tell her husband about her discovery. That was the logical first step. Although…

Everyone else had their little secrets about their days, didn’t they? Didn’t she deserve to have some little secret? Something to keep tucked away in the back of her mind? Of course she did. She would tell them eventually. Of course she would.

But for now, she cleaned off a spot on top of the entertainment center, and placed the glass bowl up there, centered above the television. It would be days, maybe weeks, before anyone noticed it, and then she could say ‘oh, we’ve had that for ages,’ in an offhanded way.

She wrapped the gun in an old kitchen towel and tucked it away in a decorative box underneath the coffee table, the one with all their old remotes that they held onto for some reason.

She dusted the sand off of the trowel and the metal detector, and returned them to the garage.

Finally, she went upstairs to shower, and remove all the sand from herself.

She looked into the bathroom mirror, and saw that her face was covered in tiny red pinpricks. In some places, she even found glass and grains of sand embedded in her skin. She got out her exfoliating scrub, a thoughtful but generic gift from her younger son, and scrubbed her face, and then arms, until she thought she had gotten out everything that could be gotten.

She showered, applied a thin layer of Neosporin to her face and arms, and, following Homer’s example, climbed into bed. She could still lay down for a couple of hours before everyone else got up.


	4. What an Unexpected Turn of Events

* * *

Jean continued going out every couple of nights in the following weeks, quietly sneaking out with Homer after her family had gone to bed. She never felt unsafe walking around at night. Her town was quiet and secure, and she enjoyed the freedom that the darkness provided. She could walk for hours, from the beach to the forest and back again, and hardly see another person. It was peaceful.

Homer enjoyed the walks, and Jean let him lead the way. He seemed to have a sort of sixth doggy sense of where the best treasure would be. Once he seemed to catch onto what Jean was looking for, he would snuffle along the ground until they came to a spot he liked, where he would turn a few circles and wait for Jean to let him off the leash. Then he would dash around, chasing bugs or bats or some imaginary adversary, or he would find a good pile of leaves to roll in and take a nap.

The morning following her first excursion, after everyone had gone off to work or school, Jean had sat down on the kitchen floor with the unresponsive metal detector and an array of tools in front of her. She unscrewed the casing around screen, pulling both sides apart to reveal the wires and circuits of the machine.

She first found, and then joyfully disconnected, the speaker wires.

Then she set about trying to see if she could figure out what had gone wrong the previous night. Obviously, the machine was not programmed to detect whatever metals or alloys were in that fancy little ray gun she had found, and the readings caused it to go haywire.

Though Jean had no formal education in any kind of electrical work, she had done several odd jobs to put herself through college. One of those had been a line editing job with a large publishing house that handled all kinds of books, including the Home Depot Handbook to Small Appliance Repair.

The metal detector had several elements that she recognized from the diagrams all those years ago, though she wished she still had the manual to give herself a little refresher.

After several minutes of checking each wire and connection and every visible circuit, Jean found a few wires that looked burned out, along with a fuse that needed replacing. Thankfully, it seemed exactly the kind of work she could do herself, without having to get anyone else involved. She made a quick detour to Radio Shack during her afternoon errands, and had the whole thing up and running again by the next day.

And now, she was alone in the dark woods, Homer snoring peacefully on a pile of dirt, watching the screen. Over the past couple of weeks she had found several more of those odd guns, and some other bits and bobs that she was reluctant to test, but which had produced similar results in the way of exploding her metal detector. (She had begun buying wires and fuses in bulk, when she felt the frequent trips to Radio Shack were causing the clerks to become too familiar.)

Among her treasures she had found a long, cylindrical object that looked like a kind of wand, with two lights at the bottom next to symbols that she didn’t recognize; a very small disc, barely larger than a quarter with a row of hooked teeth lining one side that Jean was careful to keep away from her skin; some empty canisters about the size of a large thermos, with an oily residue inside; and of course, lonely chips of metal, broken off of some strange object or other, usually melted or scorched around the edges.

Jean found all of these objects various places around town, and gathered them all to her house. She stowed them different places that she knew her family wouldn’t look. The guns she moved from the living room to the attic, because it seemed too dangerous to be left to chance. The smaller pieces she wrapped in felt and placed in her jewelry box. Larger or whole artifacts she hid in the basement, in Rubbermaid containers near the washing machine. She didn’t know what exactly she planned to do with all these objects. She assumed that she would eventually turn them over to some authority, but for now she was really just enjoying the collecting of them.

Jean found nothing of interest in the woods that night, and so she woke Homer and returned home. Homer often liked to take her out into the woods, doing his little ‘Here we are!’ dance, but there was nothing interesting to be found. Jean wondered what it was that Homer thought she was looking for, what was he actually leading her to?

Well, it didn’t matter. There was a silver lining to either scenario; either she found something new for her collection, or she didn’t have to spend the next morning repairing the metal detector for their next trip. She could appreciate either outcome.

The next morning, as her sons were having some insane argument about whether it was normal to eat your toast from the top first (Jake), or the bottom first (Tom), Jean had been downing her third cup of coffee, and thinking about how valuable she would have been to her family thirty thousand years ago. She would have stayed up all night, with her above average night vision, and her keen hearing, and kept her family safe from predators. These days she just got to say things like “Fold your toast in the middle and eat it from the inside out, for all I care, just make sure you get to school on time today.” That was the price of progress.

Jean spent her day doing her usual things: working on her manuscript, tidying up the house, preparing dinner for her family. But all the while she was thinking about going out, detector in hand, and finding another inexplicable treasure to add to her collection.

As she snuck out that night, Homer led her in a different direction that usual. He was taking her in towards the heart of the city, instead of to the outskirts of town like he usually did. Jean shrugged and followed him anyway, metal detector slung over her shoulder.

When they reached the construction site across from the mall, Homer did his usual ‘here we are!’ dance.

Jean tried to pull him away, encourage him to find another spot to explore. Though she felt confident wandering the darkened streets in most areas of town, she was fairly certain that a less than desirable population hung out at the construction site at night. There had been many reports of vandalism there, from fireworks to chemical spills. It was an area that most people would avoid, even in daylight.

“Come on, bud, let’s find someplace else to go tonight,” she whispered, pulling lightly on Homer’s leash. Homer whined and pulled back. As he did, a car door slammed, echoing loudly through the empty streets, causing her to drop Homer’s leash in alarm. It was almost certainly a car door slamming, Jean told herself as Homer dodged through a hole in the chain link fence. Jean sighed and clambered in after him, whistling as quietly as she could to get his attention.

But Homer was already off chasing some cat, or rat, or disturbing, chemical-induced rat-cat hybrid, and was dutifully ignoring her.

After a few moments looking around, Jean shrugged, flicked on the metal detector, and began searching.

Naturally, being a construction site, she got a ton of hits. There was probably hardly a foot of land here that didn’t have some kind of metal bolt or rod or screw at some depth buried in the soil. Jean just ignored the individual lights that pinged on her screen, sweeping the metal detector in wide arcs in front of her, waiting for the tell-tale dance of icons and lights, followed by the soft pop and smoke.

It was cloudy that night, and Jean stumbled here and there across debris. She had begun to bring a little flashlight with her, the camping kind that transforms from flashlight to lantern and back again by sliding the plastic handle up and down, but she was reluctant to use it. She didn’t want to draw any attention to herself.

Homer zoomed past several times, and Jean was just about to catch him and head home, when she saw the Dance of the Icons on her screen. This performance was the shortest one she had ever seen, and the puff of smoke more acrid smelling than usual.

She stood very still, careful not to lose the spot the metal detector was resting on. One downside to having your equipment break every time you find something is that you can’t use it to pinpoint your item. Jean felt sure that she had left behind several small pieces of relics because she couldn’t be sure what exactly she was looking for.

She placed the metal detector on its side, and pulled out her flashlight and trowel. She began digging a small hole in the ground, then moved the metal detector out of the way when she was sure she wouldn’t lose the spot. She sifted through the dirt as she brought up each shovel full, but didn’t see anything that she thought was likely to be what she was looking for.

She dug deeper, and felt the tip of her trowel knock into something in the dirt. She tried to dig around it, but it was big. She couldn’t seem to find any edges. As she pushed the shovel into the ground one more time, she could swear she heard a hollow _clonk_ as it hit whatever was down there.

She began sweeping dirt out of the hole with her hands, and felt something smooth and slightly curved emerge beneath her fingertips. She turned on the flashlight and shone it into the hole. The light reflected back to her slightly, but not as though it was bouncing off metal. It seemed more like it was passing through something, and then bouncing back again.

Jean set the flashlight down and dug out more dirt. She wiped at the smooth surface with her fingers, moving as much dirt and debris off of it as possible with her now filthy hands. She shined the light into the hole once again. She peered in, amazed, sticking almost her whole head underground to confirm what she was seeing.

The smooth surface was glass (or something like it). And beyond that glass was something that looked very much like a spaceship.


End file.
